Visiting the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in 2003 was sobering. My mother was visiting me in China at the time and she insisted she wanted to go see it, to show me some family history.

That wasn’t the bubble bursting. It was sombre. There was some eye-opening. But nothing really that I didn’t already know, and I’d already experienced Bergen-Belsen, so the sheer inhumanity of human beings was nothing new to me. Further, the people attending it looked by turns somber and shocked, but that was about it. The Chinese people in attendance were basically reacting like I did.

Or so I thought.

The bubble bursting moment was this song¹. This is where I found out that there is no forgiveness for this. That there is still a very strong undercurrent of raw fury at Japan and others that’s just lurking quietly beneath a facade of joviality. The bill for the massacre has not yet been paid, and it became clear to me in about 2020 how big that bill was likely to be.

Oh, and where I found out that the rage is infectious.

¹ It’s a common joke to say “don’t click on this link!” to the point that this warning will likely fall on deaf ears. But do not click this link if you are in any kind of a fragile state. The song is brutal and unrelenting (as is the whole album it is from). There are no happy feelings. There is incalculable pain, misery, rage, and resignation. It is not something to experience lightly.